Slabs

“When Billmeyer-Finn documents or records, she does so to dissolve the linearity of narrative. She rejects the predominantly western hierarchy of expression, one in which written or verbal linguistic coherence takes precedent over any other mode of speech or communication. Her lists of quotations are both a linguistic record, but also an embodied documentation of experience: a rendering. These perceived notions of linguistic superiority are entrenched in white patriarchy. Slabs molds a specific communicative space that acknowledges the idiosyncrasies of language—through writing and speech, but also through touch, emotion, memory—to create a rhizomatic and evolutionary organism. She exposes ambiguity within words and excavates spaces of non-definition, states of flux. Space where memory is held.”

“The form and language of Slabs is both ethereal like memory and tangible like the body. Lists, fragmented text, and repetition collage together, through which nuance and contradiction appear. Reading it is like opening a queer memory box: an assemblage of moments, feelings, and textures through which the reader is asked to hold both the sweetness and magic of queer intimacy as well as all that confines it. In this way, Slabs holds sacred the ways one survives (in) the confines and makes complicated homes out of a desire for closeness.”

“In Slabs, Brittany Billmeyer-Finn writes from the non-linear origin point of memory, where marks become visible amid an enigmatic blurriness. The slab is a transfiguring geology that carries scars. The slab harbors cracks and the inherent potential for fault lines to emerge and break. She excavates shards of memory, spaces of suppressed consciousness and isolated creativity, and reconjures them in the present.”